¶ Hopes & Dreams for WWDC 2014

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I've been meaning to write up my usual WWDC predictions but have thus far been uninspired to do so. I mean, any self-respecting Apple nerd with a website is supposed to write up their prediction list, right? It's written right there on the membership card.

I've just been distracted lately. My free time has been taken up by kiddo activities, church stuff, homeownership stuff, husband stuff, daddy stuff, stuff stuff, and more stuff.

And let's not forget that I have had a terrible track record for previous prediction lists. So call me a little jaded.

So here I am on eve before the keynote not wanting to write about predictions that will likely be regurgitation of all the rumor blogs, or dead wrong. Or both.

Instead, I am just going to share the hopes of what I'd like to see announced. After all, S stands for hope. So let's go pick some low-hanging fruit from the Apple tree.

iOS 8

Everyone's favorite mobile operating system is due for its annual upgrade. Last year was a big change, at least visually, for iOS. This year I hope to see a lot of refinement to the design and existing feature set.

  • Bake the code before shipping. Let's not repeat the fiasco of constant crashing between 7.0 and 7.1.
  • While I love the overall design direction in iOS 7, there are some areas it could stand to be dialed back a bit.
    • Making navigation buttons just text was a mistake. In iOS 7.1, the Accessibility part of settings added Button Shapes. Unfortunately they are hideous. Apple should take a cue from the the blue outline of the price/open/update button in the App Store. Use that thin blue outline for the button shapes.
    • Flatten that silly, glossy Game Center icon. Or better yet, get rid of the standalone Game Center app. Who actually opens that thing?
    • The "missed" tab in Notification Center makes zero sense. Get rid of that.

  • I really want Apple to bring its A-Game for modernizing its already-existing features.

    • Maps needs an adrenaline shot to the heart. The data is just terrible. A few things (very few) that I have reported issues on have been fixed in my city, but there are entire city blocks and neighborhoods that are mislabeled or even missing. And for some reason, if Apple isn't sure what a street name is, they just label it as O Ave. Now, there is a main road named O St, but there sure seem to be a lot of residential streets in Apple Maps named O Ave.

    • I'd also love to see Siri gets a lot smarter and useful. Google is downright shaming Apple with Google Now inside their iOS apps (and even more on Android phones). I shouldn't need to hold down a button to activate Siri in 2014. I should be able to use a phrase like "Hey Siri" to her it to listen up. Much like "Okay Google" for Google Now or "Xbox" for the Xbox One.

      A friend was telling me today how his Moto X knows he is driving and puts everything into a handsfree mode automatically. When he received a text message, it automatically piped up and told him a new text had come in, and asked if he wanted to listen to it. He didn't have to prompt his phone first.

      Siri has constantly felt like the failed promise of the almost conversational Star Trek computer. Google is getting this right on making the assistant part actually, you know, assist you.

    • Hail Mary Hope: A Siri voice store. I'd gladly pay to have Siri sound like Jarvis from the Iron Man movies.

    • An end to the multitude of modal dialogs asking for permission for everything on the first launch of a new app. I like what iMore came up with in their Privacy Sheet mockup.
    • I'd like Calendar on iOS to get the Travel Time integration that the Mac has. It is incredibly useful information, but not so much on my Mac. This is needed on my iPhone more than anything.

OS X

If the rumor mill is to be believed, OS X is now up for the major interface overhaul like iOS received last year. While I really like OS X as is right now, I am entirely open to change. No matter what happens visually, there are a couple things I want OS X to get this year.

  • I adore AirDrop on iOS. It is simple and fantastic and just plain works. OS X's AirDrop has always been…complicated. And the fact that it is not compatible with iOS' AirDrop in any sense is maddening. I'd like to see OS X's AirDrop mimic the simplicity of iOS, and become compatibly with its mobile sibling.
  • Since I went on about Siri ad nauseum earlier, I won't do so again, other than to say why do we not have Siri on OS X yet?
  • Kill Dashboard. It's a relic and hasn't changed much since OS X 10.4 Tiger.
  • But keep things like weather integration, but just toss it in Notification Center for easy access.
  • Break iTunes into smaller apps. Have a Music app that does handles music playback and purchasing. Merge the iOS App Store into the Mac App Store (especially since the MAS is already named App Store). Bring back the iSync name for an app for iOS device management. Make a Videos app to purchase and play your iTunes videos.

iCloud

Ah, iCloud. So much promise, so many headaches. This list could easily get carried away, but I'm going to keep it to just a few points.

  • More free storage. In 2014, 5GB is paltry. The competition gives a lot more away for free. At the very least give us 5GB per device on our account, instead of 5GB for all of them to share. And give us more bang for the buck on the extra storage options.
  • Fix Photo Stream. I don't know how to do it, but do it. It is one of the most confusing aspects of iCloud as a service today.
  • Help me to trust iCloud sync by making it easier for developers to support it. Right now it is a black box to developers that they are supposed to trust. That's fine and dandy until it breaks and my data ends up hosed, and developers don't know what happened. Transparency is key here.

Whew, that really did feel like an airing of grievances, but it isn't without merit. Apple's hardware has remained top notch, but there are many aspects of their software and services where things have languished. I think a lot of this is the rigidity of the once-a-year updates. That is an incredibly long time for software, but even longer for services like iCloud.

In a dozen hours we'll see what Apple's engineers have been laboring over. I'm super excited, and can't wait to see if some of the above items come true.

¶ iPad Second

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In the early days of iOS app development, there was one screen size to worry about. A simple 3.5-inch screen at 320x240 pixels. The retina display in the iPhone 4 was the first added complexity to designing iOS apps, as the resolution doubled to 640x480 pixels, but stayed at that 3.5-inch screen.

The original iPad is what really shook things up. A much larger screen at 9.7-inches, and a different aspect ratio with 1024x768 pixels. While an existing iPhone app could be run on it, it wasn't pretty. Apple's solution was to have either apps that ran only on the iPad, or to have what they called universal apps, where the iPhone and iPad interfaces were bundled into a single app.

This was a great opportunity for app makers to reimagine their apps for a new class of device, however, those who wanted to be first to the iPad only had weeks to completely redesign their apps for a device they had not yet held.

Everything was experimental.

Naturally, this was a little risky for app makers. I recall many of my favorite apps coming to iPad as separate apps from their iPhone counterparts. It made sense, as no one knew whether the iPad would be a runaway success1, or if would be derided as "just a giant iPhone."2

As time has gone on and the iPad has found its place in the world, many apps that had separate releases for iPhone and iPad released major updates as universal apps.

There were inevitably some apps which targeted the iPad first. There is even a site dedicated to celebrating apps that ship for iPad first, though it doesn't appear to have been updated recently. One app that comes to the forefront of my mind is iA Writer. The iPad app shipped first, and an iPhone interface was added later.

These days I can't say I see too many apps debuting as iPad first. Most are universal at launch, or start out on the iPhone first.

What is more interesting to me is not the initial launch, but rather the order in which features are added. For the rest of this article, I want to focus on universal apps.

I prefer universal apps. I switch between my iPhone and iPad constantly, however the mood or situation strikes me. One thing I enjoy is that when an app is universal, it is simply there for me no matter which of the two devices I pick up. This leaves me with a certain expectation that the feature set between the iPad version and iPhone version of a universal app should be pretty on par.

Unfortunately that rarely seems to be the case. Too often these days I see universal apps gain new features and designs and layouts on the iPhone first, and the iPad side of it just lags behind.

Let's call out some apps that do this. Twitter is one of the biggest offenders. They consistently roll out new features to the iPhone first, and maybe someday bring them to the iPad side. I've seen Twitter drastically overhaul the interface of the iPhone before, and leave the iPad interface to languish for months.

Facebook is another one. They usually roll out design and feature updates to iPhone first, and iPad sometime later.

Even some apps I love dearly do this. Day One, as much as it pains me to say, has done this. They will roll out a feature on iPhone, then bring it to iPad. Thankfully, they are usually quick to bring things back into feature parity, but sometimes I'd rather just wait a couple extra weeks for a truly complete update to a universal app, rather than a staggered rollout.

I don't think this practice would bother me so much if the app in question were not universal. To me, universal does not just convey that I pay once to install on both device types. It conveys that the two interfaces should be maintained in parity.

Apps that have done this right the past couple years have been Twitterrific, Paprika, Byword, 1Password 3, and others. These apps continually release feature parity as universal apps across the two interfaces, without feeling like the iPad version is "just a bigger version of the iPhone".

I am delighted that many smaller development companies sweat the details to make sure their universal apps always feel universal in every way. My fear, though, is that some of the bigger companies like Twitter and Facebook are setting a trend where the iPad is an afterthought for universal apps, and that the iPad will become a second class citizen in app development, instead of a joint-heir with the iPhone.

  1. Spoiler alert: It was. ↩

  2. That happened, too. ↩

  3. Disclosure: I work for AgileBits. ↩

The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain→

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This is not one of those "Turn off every useful feature of iOS" posts that grinds my gears. My goal is to deliver practical steps to truly solve your iOS battery woes.

Scotty Loveless lays out the best advice I've read on how to get the battery in your iOS device to go the extra mile, without compromising the experience Apple designed in iOS. This is a must read.

iOS 7.1 is Out→

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This is a big update for iOS 7. It should bring quite a bit of stability and refinement to iOS, along with a few welcome features.

More than anything it is a ton of bug fixes, especially the dreaded home screen crasher that has been vexing me for the past 6 months.

It is a very welcome update, but it is a little shocking it took 6 months to fix so many of the glaring issues in iOS 7 in one big update than a number of iterative updates.

If you haven't updated yet, be sure to go and run Software Update from Settings after you do an iCloud or iTunes backup.

¶ My First Mac

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My first Mac was technically not my own. It was my parents', but it belonged to the family. The year was 1990. I was 5 years old. The Macintosh Classic was its name. It sported a 9-inch grayscale screen at 512 x 342 pixels, a 40 MB hard drive, and 1.44 MB diskette drive. It was the first Mac to cost less than $1,000.

Yeah, baby.

I was enamored with it. It seemed light years ahead of the black screen and green text IBMs my school had. I could play Wheel of Fortune on it. By far my favorite thing to do was to open AppleWorks and make a new drawing document and begin using a digital canvas to create a city with that big clunky mouse. Then I'd select this tool that looked like a tornado to send pixels flying!1

That little Mac was the beginning of my love for technology. When my folks upgraded to a Power Macintosh 7100 a few years later, the Internet was also just gaining traction with the public. My folks were always early adopters, and so we of course had the Internet.2 I remember adding USB to the Power Mac, upgrading the processor to a G3 processor from Sonnet, and how lightning fast it felt when we switched out the 14.4k modem for a 28.8k.

We got a full decade out of that machine with all the upgrades, and it likely could have gone more.

Then came the eMac I got for college. This was truly my first Mac. I quickly found out that a 50-pound behemoth was not ideal at college in 2003. This was my first experience with OS X. I hopped on the bus with 10.2 Jaguar, and 10.3 Panther was released just a couple months later. Safari was at version 1.0, and I haven't changed my default browser since. I used the eMac my freshman year, then it went to my parents to replace the old Power Mac.

My sophomore year I went with the 14-inch iBook G4. I used this through most of college and wrote many papers on it.

My senior year I treated myself to the black MacBook while I still had an education discount. That thing was lovely. I still kind of miss it, as it just looked fantastic. I would love for Apple to make a black space gray MacBook Air.

A few years later I got the first unibody MacBook Pro, 15-inch. This felt like a dream computer. It had real horsepower and was the fastest & thinnest computer I had used yet.

And, just about a year ago, I went to the MacBook Air. The Air is just plain fantastic. It's fast, it's battery lasts ages, and it is light. When you want to close up and go, you can do just that.

The Mac has been a significant part of my life for the past 23 years. It sparked the curiosity of a young boy and challenged me to learn more throughout the years. And these days it is integral to my way of life, not only in how I accomplish my own goals, but also to how I am able to provide for my family. Right now, I simply could not do what I do without the Mac.

Happy 30th birthday, Mac. Here's to many more.

  1. And they were pretty big pixels when you think about it! ↩

  2. "You’ve got mail!" ↩

¶ The Annoying State of the Apple Wireless Keyboard

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Lately I have had conversations with a couple friends after I expressed rage frustration at how quickly my Apple Wireless Keyboard chews through a pair of Eneloop AA's1. Naturally, once I began to resent one thing, I began to notice the rest of its flaws compared to the modern state of other Bluetooth keyboards. What follows are my gripes with the Apple Wireless Keyboard, and how they should be fixed.

Tim Cook, if you're reading, I would give my kingdom for this keyboard.

The Battery

AA's, while fairly universal, are ridiculous in this day & age of Apple devices. The iPad and the MacBook Air get amazing battery life. I'd like to see Apple bring their expertise in battery tech to their peripherals. Ditch the tube shape on the back that holds batteries, and go to a MacBook Air-like wedge shape with a good sized internal battery. Recharge it via a Lightning cable when needed, and have it still usable while plugged into your Mac.

Also, I imagine moving to Bluetooth 4 would help with energy usage, and every new Apple device in the past couple years has come equipped with that.

The Keys

If you've been paying attention to any of Apple's portable Macs in the last few years, you'd know that the white keys of the Apple Wireless Keyboard look like a turd compared to the elegant black keys of portable Macs. Can you imagine how mismatched this keyboard looks next to the new Mac Pro?

Another thing Apple could borrow from the MacBook line is backlit keys. My proposed wedge shape, which could accommodate a nicely sized rechargeable battery, with a more energy efficient Bluetooth 4, could hopefully handle powering backlit keys. It's darn near 2014, it is time to have black, backlit keys on a wireless keyboard.

Easy to Use Multiple Device Support

The Logitech K811 keyboard is almost the keyboard of my dreams, except it is a little on the ugly side with that black stripe across the top. It has black, backlit keys, an internal rechargeable battery (but over the sucky micro-USB), and this amazing ability to switch between a Mac, iPhone, & iPad with the press of a button. They call it EasySwitch for a reason.

When one of Apple's main goals is to get you to own a Mac, iPhone, & iPad, they should be selling a keyboard that gives extremely low friction in using it with all three devices.

Conclusion

There are some really great keyboards out there that are close to my dream keyboard, the aforelinked Logitech K811 being the closest, save for being a bit on the ugly side. I want Apple to step into this decade of technology with their keyboard, and utilize many of the technologies they've been pushing forward.

So let's recap what the next Apple Keyboard should be like.

  • Wedge shape, like the MacBook Air
  • Good-sized internal battery
  • Lightning port for recharging from an outlet or Mac.
  • Bluetooth 4
  • Black keys
  • Backlit keys
  • Ability to switch quickly and easily between Mac, iPhone, & iPad.

And hey, while we're at it, let's update the Magic Trackpad with the wedge shape, internal battery, Lightning port, and Bluetooth 4.

Again, I'd give my kingdom for peripherals like this.

  1. It is widely believed Apple uses relabeled Eneloops for their rechargeable battery kit. ↩